General Class Information Class Handouts Scores Assignments Reference Materials Miscellaneous

CSc 345 Analysis of Discrete Structures Spring 2008 Lester I. McCann, Ph.D.

The University of Arizona U of A College of Science Department of Computer Science McCann's Home Page

General Class Information

• Class syllabus (general course information)
• Some thoughts about exams:
  • Characteristics of Good Exam Answers (suggestions on how to reply to short-answer exam questions)
  • Suggestions for Studying For and Taking Exams (what to do before and during an exam)
• Class Announcements: The primary reference for class information outside of lectures is the cs.course345 news group on the CS dept. news server (news.cs.arizona.edu). See these instructions on how to configure your email client to access the server.
• Program Documentation and Development:
  • Programming Style Requirements (summary)
  • Toward Developing Good Programming Style (many documents here)
• A brief tutorial on using the turnin utility.

Class Handouts       (In case you lost your copy, or missed class)

• Class syllabus
• Programming Style Requirements
• Asymptotic Notation Summary and Examples
• Recurrence Relations for Practice
• Single Source Shortest Path Algorithms
• Optimal BST Algorithm Handout
• Improved External Merge Sort (as PNG image)

Final Course Grades       (Updated after each exam has been graded)

• Final Course Grades (posted 2008/05/13 5:15pm)

Assignments (in PDF format)

• Written:
  • Homework #1 Due: 01/24
  • Homework #2 Due: 02/14
  • Homework #3 Due: 04/15
  • Homework #4 Due: 05/06
• Programmed:
  • Program #1: Somewhat Simplified Solitaire Encryption Algorithm. Due 02/07
  • Program #2: Bones Battle. Due 03/06
    • prog2.zip: The collection of project files, plus ReadMe.txt.
    • BonesBattle.jar: Playable version of Bones Battle. Run from command line with `java -jar BonesBattle.jar'.
    • Dice Wars, the inspiration for this assignment.
    • AggressiveStrategy.zip, the strategy used in the BB demo. Provided so that you can pit your strategies against it.
  • Program #3: Columnsort. Due 03/27
    • The sample data files: prog3a.dat and prog3b.dat
    • Here's a flash animation of the algorithm, produced by Rachel Nehmer.
  • Program #4: "They did the MASH..." Due 04/10
  • Program #5: Concordance Construction and 2-3-4-5 Trees. Due 04/29

Reference Materials       (Pointers to additional information)

• Java 2 API Specification
• Text book's Home Page In particular, note the list of errata and the book's source code collection , should you wish to compile and run the book's examples.
• Here's a page of LaTeX Resources , for those of you interested in learning about using LaTeX 2e to format your homework solutions.
• My templates directory has copies of the external and internal documentation templates for you to cut-n-paste into your code. external.txt, class.txt and internal.txt are the versions with my explanations for the purposes of each section. Use ext.txt, cl.txt and int.txt for importing into your code; they are explanation-free, meaning that you won't have to delete anything before using them.
• Generics in Java 1.5:
  • From Sun:
    • An overview
    • 23-page tutorial (PDF)
  • From O'Reilly's OnJava.com, excerpts from Java in a Nutshell, 5/e:
    • Generic Types, Part 1
    • Generic Types, Part 2
• Example Programs
  • Topic G (Generics): TGn01.java TGn02.java TGn03.java TGn04.java
  • Topic 1: T01n01.java T01n02.java T01n03.java T01n04.java
  • Topic 2: T02n01.java T02n02.java T02n03.java T02n04.c T02n05.java T02n06.java
  • Topic 3: T03n01.java
  • Topic 6: T06n01.java T06n02.java T06n03.java T06n04.java

Miscellaneous       (A place for stuff that doesn't really fit anywhere else)

• Collection of Common CS Service Links (Account application, compute CSID, etc.)
• The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
• Sorting Applets: watch the algorithms work!
  • Smith College
  • xSortLab
• The Sorting Out Sorting movie by Prof. Ronald Baecker. He offers two Quicktime clips of the film:
  • Summary (Time: 3:16)
  • Last Scene (Time: 1:14)
• Ryan Lovrien developed this Shortest Path Visualization applet in the Spring of 2006 as part of an honors project. You might find it instructive to play with.
• Like NP-Completeness in song form? Find the Longest Path
• James Jones' Chutes and Ladders simulation

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If you have any comments about this page, drop me a note at mccannl@acm.org